Mental Health and Bacteria in our Gastrointestinal tract: “The gut is really your second brain,” says Dr. James Greenblatt, “There are more neurons in the GI tract than anywhere else except the brain.” Greenblatt’s solution might strike us as simple, but he’s actually targeting a vast, complex, and mysterious realm of the human body: around 90 percent of our cells are actually bacterial, and bacterial genes outnumber human genes by a factor of 99 to 1. Researchers are examining how changes in the dominant species of bacteria can affect our behaviour, stress levels and mood. “Developmental programming” — the idea that various environmental factors, to which we’re exposed early on, greatly determine the structure and function of organs including the gut and the brain, may determine base-line stress characteristics early on: We know “there are changes that happen early in life that we can’t reverse,” said John Cryan, a neuroscientist at the University of Cork in Ireland and a main investigator at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre. “But there are some changes that we can reverse. It tells us that there is a window when microbes are having their main effects and, until this closes, many changes can be reversed.”
Posted on: Tue, 06 May 2014 15:42:13 +0000
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